May 1, 2025 • 58 mins
At the end of this miniseries about white supremacist terrorism in the final years of apartheid in South Africa, this episode returns to the present day as white South Africans are lining up outside the embassy in Pretoria to claim refugee status under Trump's executive order.
Sources:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-focuses-persecution-claims-white-south-africans-seek-resettlement-2025-04-24/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/06/white-afrikaner-donald-trump-america-us-administration
https://www.dw.com/en/us-diplomat-ejected-from-new-zealand-after-mysterious-incident/a-38016563
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/24/australia-expels-israeli-diplomat
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59023465
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/world/americas/06ecuador.html
https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/05/29/so-how-do-you-expel-an-ambassador-anyway/
https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/topic/social/
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/pool-reports-february-2-2025
https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/topic/calendar/
https://www.enca.com/news-top-stories/ramaphosa-slams-afriforum-solidarity
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-02-13-apartheid-stratcom-agents-trump-edwin-feulner/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
All zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
In February of twenty twenty five, the President of the
United States announced, first by social media and then by
executive order that a white nationalist conspiracy theory is now
official foreign policy. No longer relegated to racist message boards
and poorly attended rallies, the idea that white South Africans
(00:29):
are being violently persecuted is now center stage. In the
months since the administration has doubled down on this stance,
foreign aid to South Africa has been suspended, their ambassador
has been expelled, and now State Department officials have begun
interviewing white South Africans who have applied for refugee resettlement
(00:51):
in the United States. Apartheid ended in South Africa thirty
one years ago. It turns out some of the same
people who fought tooth and nail to keep it back
then are still around and they haven't stopped fighting. I'm
(01:13):
Molly Conger, and this is weird.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Little guys.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
You know, I don't like current events. I really prefer
to root around the past and piece together the odds
and ends of the life and crimes of someone who's
done hurting other people. I had a great time writing
five episodes about Dennis Mahon, a man whose career as
a white supremacist activist span decades. But when it came
(01:57):
time to write a follow up episode, I hate it
to have to tell you that, even though Dennis will
almost certainly die before he finish his prison sentence, the
one he got for sending a bomb to the diversity
office in Scottsdale, Arizona, the current political climate finished what
he started. Republican politicians did what he couldn't do with
(02:20):
that bomb, and they closed that office. And we find
ourselves in something of a similar position now. These last
few episodes have been a wild, sprawling narrative about white
supremacist terrorism in South Africa in the final years of apartheid,
and I've learned a lot of history that I'd never
been exposed to before, and I've really enjoyed digging my
(02:43):
way out of some of these unexpected rabbit holes. But
it would be irresponsible of me to tell you such
a long story and then leave you thinking that it
was over, that it ended in nineteen ninety four, that
when apartheid ended, the international networks of right wing extremists
who'd done unspeakable things in its defense just faded away
(03:07):
because they didn't, and they don't always need guns and
bombs to get what they want. So we'll end this
mini series where we started it the White House back
in February. When I started down this path, I had
just read the executive Order, the one titled addressing the
(03:29):
Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa. In the
week that order was signed, Trump had offered some insight
into what was going on in his head in this
post on truth social.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
South Africa is confiscating land and treating certain classes of
people very badly. It's a bad situation that the radical
left media doesn't want so much as mention. A massive
human rights violation at a minimum is happening for all
to see. The United States won't stand for it. We
(04:02):
will act also. I will be cutting off all future
funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this
situation has been completed.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
And that episode back in February goes into more detail
about what he's getting at here. South African President Cyril
Ramaposa had recently signed the Expropriation Act into law. There's
a lot of misinformation and fear mongering built around a
very tiny kernel of truth. In there as a quick refresher,
(04:39):
The Expropriation Act does allow the Government of South Africa
to expropriate land. That part's true, but only under certain
specific conditions. And it is fundamentally not really that different
from what we call eminent domain here in the United States,
(04:59):
and that's a power that was given to our government
by the Fifth Amendment. There's no racial component to it.
Nobody's terrorizing white farmers. There's no language at all in
the Expropriation Act about race. I spent probably too long
trying to look for clues that would help me guess
(05:19):
why he made that post on truth Social on February second.
Sometimes you can see a really clear direct line which
means something the president says or it does or posts online.
And the Fox News segment that he had just been
watching and that episode from back in February makes what
(05:41):
I think is a pretty good case for how Trump's
ideas about what's going on in South Africa were formed
back when he posted about it for the first time
in twenty eighteen, and back in twenty eighteen, he tweeted
about South African land reform for the first time about
forty five minutes after he heard of it on an
episode of Tucker Carlson. But on February second, twenty twenty five,
(06:07):
he made that truth social post while he was sitting
on Air Force one en route to DC after a
weekend golfing in Florida. His public schedule for that day
doesn't give us much, but he did post several times
that evening about Fox News host Mark Levin, and he
posted an old clip from Levin's show, and he reposted
(06:27):
one of Mark's old posts, and he posted in all caps.
Watched Mark Levin tonight on Fox News eight pm Eastern
Great Show, and Levin's show that evening doesn't seem to
have touched on the issue of South Africa, So honestly,
I couldn't tell you how the idea got into his head.
That night, after a long day on the golf course,
(06:48):
he posted it around six nineteen pm, and then forty
minutes later, as he's sitting on the tarmac after the
plane landed, he reposted it. And as he's leaving for
the White House, a reporter asked him about the post. So,
on Tritoto, you said that you were going to touch
it from South Africa. Will you plan to cut eight
(07:10):
across other African nations, in white South and only South Africa.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
Terrible things are happening in South Africa.
Speaker 4 (07:17):
The leadership is.
Speaker 5 (07:20):
Doing some terrible things, horrible things.
Speaker 6 (07:23):
So if that's under investigation right now, we'll make a determination.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
And until such time as we find out what South
Africa is doing.
Speaker 5 (07:32):
They're taking away land.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
They're confiscating land, and actually.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
They're doing things that are perhaps far worse than that.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
The far worse than that at the end of his
remarks is almost certainly a reference to his belief in
the white genocide conspiracy theory, that false narrative that white
farmers in South Africa are being murdered in enormous numbers.
And later that same week, in February of twenty twenty five,
Donald Trump signed the executive order cutting off aid to
(08:05):
South Africa, and it also directed DHS and the State
Department to quote promote the resettlement of African er refugees
escaping government sponsored race based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation,
and so, in conjunction with his other executive orders ones
(08:26):
that suspended all other refugee resettlement operations, this now puts
white South Africans in a class all of their own.
They're the only people on earth who are so persecuted,
who are suffering so terribly that they are deserving of
assistance from the United States. And the executive order ignited
(08:49):
a flurry of activity on the right, both in the
United States and in South Africa. Far right talking heads
rushed to book South African guests, and one man in
particular was very happy to oblige. In the last two months,
Ernst Rootz has made the rounds. He's been interviewed by
(09:10):
Ben Shapiro, Matt Gates, Tucker Carlson, Jack Bestobic, and Jordan Peterson.
He's been on YouTube lives and shows that only exist
on Twitter. Somehow, he made an appearance on a show
hosted by Rinaldo Grause, a South African YouTuber whose political
career was stopped dead in its tracks last summer. Just
(09:30):
days after he was elected to parliament, his own parties
stripped him of membership after video service to him calling
for the murder of all black people, and he used
both the American racial slur that you're probably familiar with
and a South African equivalent. And roots also gave an
(09:52):
interminably long interview to a benign sounding website called the
White Papers Policy Institute, But as it turns out, the
woman interviewing him has a long history of affiliation with
neo Nazi groups, and Ernst Roots may sound familiar to you.
(10:12):
In twenty eighteen, he visited the United States in his
capacity as the deputy CEO of the Africaner nationalist group Afroforum.
He met with federal government officials and right wing think tanks. Notably,
he spent a day at the Heritage Foundation. He took
meetings with staffers for Ted Cruz, and during that visit,
(10:34):
he appeared on an episode of The Talker Carlson Show
back when it was actually on TV, back when it
was appointment television for the president. And you might think
that Ernst Roots would have nothing but praise for Trump's
executive order. Right, He's finally getting this message out, someone
(10:55):
in power is finally talking about this epidemic of white
farm being murdered in South Africa, and he is He's
grateful for that, sure, but he doesn't think Trump's proposed
solution is the right one. Here's what he said when
he sat down with Tucker Carlson at the end of February.
Speaker 7 (11:18):
On one part of it says that they will grant
refugee status to africaners if they want to go to
the US, which I don't think. In all fairness, we're
really grateful for the public stance taken by the US,
and in a certain sense they haven't gone far enough.
But in a certain sense, I don't think the granting
of refugee state is much of a solution. Some people
(11:41):
will take that up. But that's why I told you
the story of the Battle of Blood River and the
vow we are culturally very very attached to South Africa.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
And here he is telling Jordan Peterson the same thing
a few weeks later.
Speaker 7 (12:00):
That's why I'm so grateful that we spoke about the
history part at first is our concern is that if
we just leave the country, our culture dissolves and our
communal identity dissolves and we become Americans or whatever and so.
Speaker 6 (12:15):
Well, plus the entire country descends into lawlessness, chaos and
everyone dies. Yep, right, because if all the white South
African farmers leave, that's one hundred percent what will happen.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Ernst Rutz is a nationalist. He doesn't want to leave
South Africa. He isn't being persecuted for his whiteness. He
just misses the days when white minority rule meant the
persecution of everyone else. And in both those interviews, Ruts
spoke at some length about the importance of the Day
(12:51):
of the Vow, about the covenant between God and the
Africaner granting them that land they can't leave. Men like
Ernst Roots are still standing on the banks of the
Blood River waiting for God to sweep all the Africans
out of their way, and ahead of that whirlwind press Junket.
(13:12):
In February and March, Ernst Ruts actually resigned from his
position as head of the Afrikaner Foundation, and that was
an initiative under the umbrella of the Africanner interest group
the Solidarity Movement, and Ruts says that he hadn't officially
worked for Afroforum since twenty twenty three, but Afroform and
(13:33):
the Africaner Foundation are both just part of the Solidarity movement.
These are just facets of the same organization, and so
now in February of twenty twenty five, he no longer
works for any of these organizations. He no longer works
for Solidarity at all, because it was Roots who got
the organization into some pretty hot water.
Speaker 7 (13:57):
Well, all they're saying that we've the organizations that I
was involved with at the time of committed treason, that
we've been charged for treason.
Speaker 6 (14:04):
Even charged with treason.
Speaker 7 (14:05):
Yeah for what for speaking well, among others, for me
speaking with you about what's happened as treason? Yeah, because
it's bad mouthing your country.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
I mean, we've all made mistakes at work, but I
can't imagine making such a mess of things that somebody
gets charged with treason. And he's watering that down a
little bit.
Speaker 8 (14:29):
Right.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
The accusation isn't just that he's bad mouthing the country.
I'm sure it's legal in South Africa to say negative
things about the nation. But almost immediately after Trump announced
that he was cutting off aid to South Africa, a
lot of South Africans blamed Afro Forum. Members of mkanto
We sizway rallied outside of the police station in Cape
(14:52):
Town and announced that they were filing a criminal complaint
against Affro Forum, accusing them of treason. And just a
quick note for those who aren't up to date on
their South African current events, I wasn't on Kandoce's way
is now its own political party. It does share a
name with the group that functioned as the paramilitary arm
(15:14):
of the African National Congress during the last decades of apartheid,
but as of a few years ago, it is a
political party.
Speaker 5 (15:22):
So just for clarity, the MK Party vehemently condemns the
trees and US actions of Africa Forum, which has deliberately
low it foreign powers to act against the sovereignty and
economic interests of South Africa. Their betrayal is nothing less
(15:42):
than an act of economic sabotage, a direct assault on
our nations independence.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
From many South Africans, it was obvious Trump didn't come
up with this idea on his own. There is a
straight line between afrofums trips to the United States, their
appearances in American right wing media, their collaboration with American
think tanks, their English language propaganda videos targeting American audiences
(16:15):
on American platforms, and the end result, which was this
shift in US foreign policy. Even President Ramaposa has gone
on record blaming Afroform and Solidarity for spreading the lies
about South Africa that led to Trump's executive order. He
called the group unpatriotic in remarks before the National Assembly
(16:38):
in March.
Speaker 8 (16:41):
Fact, whether that is treason US or not is a
meta that obviously our law enforcement agencies needs to look at.
The National Prosecuting Agency needs to look at that. But
I take a dim view, in fact, a very negative
view off what has ensued as they run around the
(17:03):
world bed mouthing their own country and putting their country
into distribute, not by things that are happening, but by misinformation.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
The matter has been confirmed to be under investigation, but
there has been no decision announced by the National Prosecuting
Authority as to whether the case will proceed. When Ramaposa
gave those remarks on March eleventh, twenty twenty five, he
wasn't just talking about Ernst Roots going on.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Tucker Carlson.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Roots had in fact already resigned from Solidarity by the
time he returned to the US this year. But in
late February, a delegation from Solidarity paid a visit to
the United States. They posted quite a few videos of
themselves outside various government buildings in Washington, d C. They
posted some videos of them standing in lobbies of government
(17:59):
buildings and one photo that appears to show the delegation
touring the White House with visible visitors badges. There are
no photos of any members of the delegation that I
could find that show them with any actual US policymakers,
but they did take a couple of selfies in front
of a sign that says Committee on Foreign Affairs. One
(18:22):
photo was taken outside the office of Senator Christopher Coons,
a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and
its Africa and Global Health Policy subcommittee. Their press releases
about this visit don't name names, but they claim to
have met with senior officials within the Trump administration during
their visit.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
There's no direct.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Claim made that they met with the President himself, although
one of them did post a cartoon style drawing of
the group that features a cartoon Trump standing with them
in front of the White House, and that is perhaps
meant to insinuate that they were a to secure an
audience with the President. But one member of the delegation
(19:04):
posted something that is more interesting to me than a
selfie at the Capitol Building. On February twenty seventh, Jako
Kleinhans wrote Day three in Washington, d c. Who influences
US government policy a complex network of individuals, organizations, and
governmental and non governmental structures worked daily to develop US
(19:27):
government policy. Recent policy decisions on the relationship with South
Africa have been developed by a few key players at
influential organizations, together with policy specialist in the White House
and Congress. The Solidarity Movement delegation currently visiting the USA
met on day three with several of these influential people
with whom we have forged good relationships over the past
(19:48):
few years, to discuss a way forward. And underneath this
wall of text posted in Afrikaans is a selfie. Visible
in the photo behind Jacko is the entrance to the
offices of the Heritage Foundation. That conservative think tank is not,
as far as I can tell, publicly commented on the
(20:11):
recently serviced allegations that they worked closely with South African
military intelligence to craft propaganda campaigns during the latter years
of apartheid. South African news outlet The Daily Maverick did
take extra care to note in their article that the
Heritage Foundation has made no legal challenge to the twenty
(20:31):
twenty one book by a former South African policeman who
claims that former Heritage Foundation president Edwin Fulner was often
consulted for advice by South African intelligence operatives who ran
the government's apartheid disinformation campaigns. And if you can remember
all the way back to the first episode in this series,
(20:54):
the first time Trump tweeted about South Africa, he was
watching Tucker Carlson interview a policy analyst from the Heritage Foundation.
Just something to mull over, I guess and whoever it
(21:21):
was that the delegation was able to meet with at
the White House, that person received an official memorandum from Solidarity,
and they also posted that document to their website. Much
like Ernst Rutz, they're grateful to the Trump administration for
raising awareness about the plight of the white South African
but they too want the United States to use its
(21:44):
power to pressure South Africa to bend to the will
of whites, rather than simply offering those aggrieved white South
Africans the opportunity to settle in the United States. Much
of the text of this memorandum reads pretty transparently as
an attempt to smooth over the whole treason situation. They
(22:05):
emphasize repeatedly that they do not support Trump's decision to
cut off humanitarian aid, and they urge Washington not to
suspend the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a US law
that allows some African nations, including South Africa, tariff free
access to US markets. And as much as they appreciate
(22:28):
Trumps offer to take Africaners as refugees, they want to stay.
One section of the memo reads, although individuals may qualify
for a resettlement program, the majority of Africaners will still
remain in South Africa. During the past thirty years, Africaners
have begun to establish cultural infrastructure in South Africa so
(22:50):
that we can still live here freely and safely in
order for us to make a sustainable contribution toward the
country and all its people. This is being done under
the banner of the Solidarity movement, with Solidarity and AFROFUM
being the largest organizations. Security structures, social structures, job structures,
training structures, and cultural structures have been established. All of
(23:12):
this is being done without state support, and at the
bottom of that section they make several recommendations. They recommend
the United States should, instead of offering refugee resettlement, offer
direct aid to these Africaner communities quote to assist with
community infrastructure protecting Africaners. This includes security structures, social structures,
(23:37):
job structure, training structures, and infrastructure to settle africaners in
vulnerable places in a concentrated manner. So they're saying they
want help moving all of the white people to a
place in South Africa. Still they don't want to leave
South Africa, but they need help moving all of the
(23:58):
white people into a concentrated place. So a place that's
all white, and that sounds kind of like a mini
ethno state, a folkstot, if you will, an island of
apartheid and a sea of integration, and that does in
fact already exist. And here's where I have to confess
(24:24):
something to you. I overlooked something in retrospect pretty obvious.
Remember I said a few minutes ago that Ernst Rutz
had resigned from his position with Solidarity and his trip
to the United States in March of twenty twenty five
was totally separate from this delegation. Well it might not
(24:45):
have actually been that separate. I mean they flew here separately,
They were here during different weeks, and they claimed to
be from separate organizations. Roots was here in the United
States with used Stridum, the current sy of Urania, a
white separatist community in South Africa's Northern Cape province. Yako Kleinhans,
(25:08):
the International liaison for Solidarity, who was here with that
other delegation. He used to be the CEO of Irania.
He and his family live there. His wife, Magdalen, was
featured in a Guardian article about the community in twenty nineteen.
She runs the call center in Irania that recruits members
(25:28):
and solicits donations. So they're the same people. The Venn
diagram is a circle. They present slightly different public faces.
I mean, Solidarity was allowed into the White House while
the delegation officially from Irania was stuck doing events like
Wine Wednesday at the New York Young Republicans Club.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
But it's sort of like.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
How sometimes the name brand ketchup and the store brand
ketchup are made at the same factory and they just
package them in different bottles. The two groups traveled the
United States separately a few weeks apart. They met with
slightly different crowds and marketed the message ever so slightly differently.
But ultimately what they want is for the United States
(26:13):
to officially recognize their three point five square mile whites
only town of three thousand people as an autonomous state.
And in February, while that first delegation, the one from
Solidarity was in Washington, d C. An American neo Nazi
group posted photos of their trip to South Africa. A
(26:37):
regional chapter within the Active Club Network visited Urania quote
to gain a deeper understanding of how whites can form
intentional communities. During the first week of March, the delegation
from Solidarity finished out their trip in the United States
with a visit to California. Specifically, they went to Los Angeles.
(26:57):
More specifically, they had lunch with Joel Poum, the editor
at large of the far right rag Breitbart. After lunch,
Pollock tweeted a photo captioned just had lunch at a
kosher restaurant owned by Steven Spielberg's mom with four gentlemen
from afroform Slash Solidarity. The South African government is investigating
(27:17):
them for treason for the crime of sharing their views
of Americans. The treason was delicious, okay, Joel, not to
nitpick and first of all, super cringe, but Steven Spielberg's
mom is dead. Lea Adler, Spielberg's mother did open the
(27:37):
restaurant The Milky Way in Los Angeles, in nineteen seventy seven,
but the restaurant closed after her death in twenty seventeen.
Her children reopened the restaurant in twenty nineteen. So it
is still the same restaurant in the same place, but
it isn't owned by a woman who's been dead for
eight years. But it's probably much more important that you
(27:59):
know one other fact about this lunch. At the time,
in the first week of March of twenty twenty five,
Joel Pollock was widely believed to be Trump's pick for
ambassador to South Africa. There'd been no official public nomination,
but Pollock was out there telling people that and going
on the news in South Africa to that effect. And
(28:22):
after lunch, Yacho Kline Hunts from Solidarity reposted that picture
and offered his full throated endorsement of Pollock's appointment as ambassador.
But barely two weeks after that lunch, Joel Pollock's chances
of getting that job dropped to mere zero. Things were
already a little dicey for him, considering he'd been publicly
(28:45):
calling for sanctions against President Cyril Ramaposa personally, specifically because
of South Africa's continued opposition to the genocide and Gaza.
But the nail in the coffin really seems to have
been his direct, per personal involvement in the expulsion of
South Africa's ambassador to the United States. On March fourteenth,
(29:09):
twenty twenty five, the United States of America expelled the
foreign diplomat. This sort of thing happens from time to time.
Article nine of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations establishes
a pretty broad authority for this quote. The receiving state may,
at any time, and without having to explain its decision,
(29:30):
notify the sending state that the head of the mission
or any member of the diplomatic staff of the mission
is persona non grata. It wasn't uncommon during the Cold War,
usually after allegations of espionage, whether real or imagined, and
it can be a way for a country to send
a political message, to say to a country, we're kind
(29:52):
of upset with you right now, even if the diplomatic
staff themselves haven't done anything wrong. Several countries expelled Syrian
diplomats in twenty twelve in response to the murder of
civilians in Hala. In twenty twenty one, President Aragon declared
diplomats from ten countries persona non grata and Turkey after
(30:12):
those countries governments had called for the release of an
imprisoned Turkish activist. Several Israeli diplomats were expelled from Britain
and Australia in twenty ten after both countries discovered that
Israel had used forged British and Australian passports to carry
out assassinations in Dubai. In twenty eleven, the US ambassador
(30:33):
to Ecuador was expelled after Wikilik's revealed that she believed
President Korea had been aware of corruption within his police force,
and the United States responded by expelling Ecuador's ambassador in return.
And sometimes it's not even political. The decision may be
the result of personal misconduct by a member of the
(30:55):
diplomatic staff. With some rather specific exceptions, ambassadors and their
staff have diplomatic immunity. They can't be prosecuted, but they
can be expelled. So for example, in twenty seventeen, New
Zealand had to expel an American diplomat after the man
got into some kind of violent physical altercation and the
(31:15):
American government refused to waive his diplomatic community so that
it could be prosecuted. In twenty twelve, the Philippines expelled
the Panamanian diplomat accused of rape. Honestly, a lot of
the examples of this that I found were related to
lower level embassy staff who got drunk, got a dui,
(31:36):
got into fights, or committed some kind of sex crime.
There have also been more than a few cases of
diplomats accused of using their position to facilitate drug trafficking.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
So it does happen.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
It doesn't even seem particularly rare, especially if you're including
these examples of lower level embassy staff who maybe got
in a bar fight, but it doesn't usually happen. By tweet,
let's work backwards. At four forty two pm Eastern Time,
(32:12):
on March fourteenth, twenty twenty five, Secretary of State Marco
Rubio tweeted South Africa's ambassador to the United States is
no longer welcome in our great country. Ibrahim Rusoul is
a race baiting politician who hates America and hates Potus.
We have nothing to discuss with him, and so he
(32:32):
is considered persona non grad up. That last bit is
in all caps, which is why I had to yell it,
and for the record, on that read, I did pronounce
Ibrahim Russul's name Ibrahim Razul, which is his name. But
in this I guess official State Department tweet, Marco Rubio
(32:56):
did misspell his name as Emra him Ressool, So take
that as you will. But Rubio's tweet included a link
to a Breitbart article, the headline of which is South
African Ambassador Ibrahim Razul Colan Trump is leading global white
supremacist movement. The article, written by Joel Pollock, had gone
(33:22):
up earlier that same day. Article might not be the
right word for it. I don't know what you call
what appears on Breitbart's website, but Pollock only actually wrote
six sentences in the original piece, but those sentences frame
the actual content. It's a video clip accompanied by a
(33:44):
transcript of the video of statements made by South African
Ambassador Ibrahim Rasul during a webinar hosted by the Mapungubwe
Institute for Strategic Reflection, a South African think tank just
called MISTRA for short.
Speaker 9 (34:01):
What Donald Trump is launching is an assault on incumbency
those who are in power by mobilizing a supremacism against
the incumbency at home, and I think I've illustrated abroad
(34:21):
as well.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
He was speaking to a small group of academics and
rasseul is talking about the ways in which American politics
have changed. He later explained to a reporter, my remarks
were speaking to South African intelligentsia, intellectuals, political leaders, and
others to alert them to a changed tradition in the
United States that the old way of doing business with
(34:47):
the US was not going to work.
Speaker 4 (34:50):
Now.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
I watched most of that webinar. I'm not gonna lie in.
It's two hours long. I didn't watch all of it.
I watched most of that webinar, but I watched all
of the parts where Ibrahim Razu speaking, and nothing he
said felt shocking to me. He wasn't being hysterical or hyperbolic.
He's not tearing his hair and gnashing his teeth. He
(35:13):
had some interesting observations about the way the white South
African functions as a rhetorical dog whistle for white victimhood
within Trump's narrative, But he didn't say anything wild. He's
not calling for violence or talking about radical shifts in policy.
He's a diplomat, right. He was just making correct observations
(35:36):
about the political climate that it is his job to navigate.
But those remarks, with Joel Pollock's six sentences of commentary,
made their way to Marco Rubio within hours, and by
that afternoon, Rubio had declared Rasoul persona nograda and ordered
him to leave the United States. When Rozoul arrived home
(36:01):
in South Africa on March twenty third, he issued a
statement He's standing by what he said about the Trump administration,
and his four page statement has some real bangers. It
goes pretty hard as far as diplomatic statements go. Quote,
when we have been the victims of apartheid and saw
(36:21):
how it cannot tolerate free speech and independent judiciary or
even peaceful dissent, then we can smell the birth of
chauvinism globally since the fear it engenders. Hear its words
and see its signs. And Razul says that quote. In
meetings with Senators and Congress members, and in the weekly
(36:42):
forums we addressed of think tanks and business associations, and
in the few meetings with the administration, we were forced
to discuss seriously how Africaners could be refugees in the USA,
while A and C leaders are threatened with personal sanctions,
we had to have void arguing how there was a
genocide in Israel. But diplomacy is not the art of lying.
(37:07):
It is the art of telling the truth gently and constructively.
Pollack sees on one line of that statement, in particular,
a parenthetical mention of an anonymous participant in the webinar,
who Rasoul calls one ex South African anti intellectual hatchetman
hiding under a pseudonym, and that's obviously a reference to
(37:29):
Joel Pollock. Rasoul is implying that Pollock himself not only
joined that webinar live, but participated in it without disclosing
his name or affiliation, and in this case his affiliation
would be editor of American conservative website Breitbart dot com
(37:51):
and also current contender for American Ambassador to South Africa.
Because during the Q and A portion, the moderator read
submitted questions out loud, and when he did so, he
read the question asker's name, and when the question was
from a reporter, the name of the outlet. The very
(38:12):
first question though, was from anonymous.
Speaker 4 (38:19):
First, because I like to start with something funny, an
anonymous comment for Ambassador Usoul Ambassador to Ssool's analysis of
the US may be correct. However, he's doing South Africa
no service by speaking this way. His job is to
represent South African interests in Washington, not to be a
left doing militant Ambassador Zoul.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Now, can I tell you for sure that that question
was submitted by Joel Pollock? Of course not, but that
appears to be what Ibraham Razool is implying in his
statement that he believes that Pollock tweeted a screenshot of
that portion of the statement and said ex Ambassador Ibrahim
Rescuol believes he was done in by a spy. Good
(39:04):
luck hunting. I watched his remarks on YouTube after they
had been publicly available at Miestra's channel for hours. Is
incompetence a defense to defamation in South African law? So
Pollack is in this tweet insinuating that he could sue
Ibrahim Rescoul for defamation for implying that Pollock was in
(39:28):
the webinar. I don't know anything about South African law,
but I don't think in an American court a claim
of defamation would hold up because he didn't actually say
Joel Pollock's name. I guess if Joel Pollock identifies publicly
as an anti intellectual hatchet man, he's welcome to make
that argument in court. But I digress, because back to
(39:52):
his actual acclaim, he's saying he wasn't in the webinar live.
He watched the replay on YouTube hours after the ended.
And the problem with that is that it isn't true.
The webinar was live. You could pre register and participate
in the Zoom meeting, or you could just watch it
(40:13):
live on YouTube. And the event was from ten am
to noon Johannesburg time, and that means that it started
at four am here on the East Coast and one
am in California, which is where Joel Pollack lives. And
I'm reasonably certain he was indeed in California that day
(40:36):
because the night before he posted a photo of the sunset,
and that morning he posted a photo of the sun rise,
and both photos were posted at the time that the
sun rose and set in the part of California where
he lives, and there are visible palm trees. So when
Joel Pollock tweeted the link to his article at eight
(40:57):
forty five am Eastern time, that's five forty five am,
where he lives, and the source code for the web
page shows that the article went live at eight thirty
five am Eastern. Again, that's five thirty five am Pacific,
and that's two and a half hours after the event ended.
(41:18):
Those six sentences didn't take two hours to write, but
he would have had to download the entire video, cut
the sections he wanted to post, transcribe those sections, and
get everything onto the website. The other problem, though, is
not how long it would have taken to cut the clips.
It's that he could not have watched a two hour
(41:41):
video and then written the article if he didn't start
watching the video until quote hours after the event ended
and the final video was available for playback online. An
op ed written by the director of the think tank
that hosted the event takes aim at Pollack, arguing that
(42:02):
it was no accident that his article made its way
to the White House so quickly. Quote Russeul has been
articulating these views and other interactions with US audiences. The
difference in this case is that Joel Pollack at Breitbart
News himself campaigning to be US ambassador in South Africa,
selectively quoted from Russeul's presentation deliberately to incite the US administration.
(42:29):
But Joel Pollock got what he wanted, kind of. He
got Ibrahim Russeul expelled from the United States, got him fired.
Ibrahim Russeul isn't the ambassador to the United States anymore.
It's a bit of a monkey's paw situation for Joel Pollock,
though the whole affair ended up ruining his own ambitions
(42:50):
of becoming an ambassador. Within days of all this going down,
Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighter's party vowed that they would
block Pollock from entering South Africa at all if he
was appointed ambassador, and they said that they could ensure
President Ramaposo wouldn't accept the appointment. A presidential spokesman was
(43:11):
a little more diplomatic about this, but they did go
on the record that the President was concerned about the
possibility of Pollock being appointed ambassador because quote, he is
engaged in a very divisive and very damaging manner towards
South Africa and South Africa related issues. By March twenty six,
(43:32):
just twelve days after Pollock's post cost Ambassador to School
his job, it was clear that he'd cost himself the
ambassador's job to Trump boasted on Truth Social that he
would be nominating Brent Bozell as the United States Ambassador
to South Africa. Brent Mozelle is not a better choice.
(44:08):
There's a lot of history behind that name, especially considering
he shares it with his father, Leo Brent Mozell the Second.
He was William F. Buckley's best friend and Joseph McCarthy's
speech writer. And then there is of course his son,
Leo Brent Bozell the fourth, who was convicted of five
felonies before getting pardoned along with all of the other
(44:29):
January six rioters. And we can't get into all that
not today. The thing you might be interested to know
about Leo Brent Mozell the Third is that he pretty
actively opposed the idea of ending apartheid, and not just
as a casual private opinion. This wasn't an ugly thought
(44:51):
he was having at home by himself.
Speaker 8 (44:53):
No.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
In nineteen eighty seven he was the head of the
National Conservative Political Action Committee, and in that capacity he
signed on as a coalition partner for a group called
the Coalition Against a n C Terrorism, and that year
the group hosted a summit to oppose a meeting between
the U S Secretary of State and Oliver Tambo, who
(45:16):
was at the time the leader of the African National Congress.
And speakers at the summit that they held included policy
analysts from groups like the Heritage Foundation. They also brought
in a South African political activist named John Gogotya. Gogatya
was the founder and leader of a political organization in
(45:38):
South Africa. It was allegedly a group of black moderates
who opposed multi racial democracy. Gogotya actually made several trips
to the United States to lobby against US sanctions on
the apartheid regime. He did turn out to be employed
by South African military intelligence, but you probably already guessed that.
(46:03):
That same year, nineteen eighty seven, Bozell produced a series
of television commercials urging Americans to write to the White
House to express their support for the Nicaraguan contras. Before
the commercials were released, Bozell attended a screening of the
videos with his special guest, Death Squad leader Adolfo Calero.
(46:25):
So there's definitely some baggage there for Bozell. The South
African Party that he was calling terrorists in nineteen eighty seven,
holds the presidency right now. Cyril Ramaposa, the current President
of South Africa, was one of the African National Congress's
negotiators during the talks that ended apartheid. While there was
(46:48):
some public uncertainty as to whether Ramaposa would admit Pollock
as an ambassador, I haven't seen any speculation that the
President would refuse to accept Bozell. But honestly, once Trump
posted that online that he was going to nominate Bozell,
there was not a lot of follow up to that,
so I guess we'll have to wait and see if
(47:08):
he's even confirmed. Because among the countless problems created every
day by the current administration is this lack of follow up.
It seems like every day the President just fires off
some half baked demand that doesn't really have any clear
force of law or plan for implementation, and maybe some
(47:31):
government office is working on implementing the new policy, and
maybe they aren't. It's hard to say that Executive order
back in February called for the Secretary of State and
the Secretary of Homeland Security to prioritize humanitarian relief, including
admission and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions program
(47:52):
for Africanners, and then a month later, on March seventh,
he posted on truth Social any farmer with family from
South Africa seeking to flee that country for reasons of
safety will be invited to the United States of America
with a rapid pathway to citizenship. This process will begin immediately.
(48:13):
A few weeks later, the website for the US Embassy
in South Africa posted a very generic set of FAQs
about the refugee admissions program, but it doesn't have any
information specific to this program or any particular timeline. It
just directs those who are interested in inquiring about the
program to send a message to a State Department email
(48:36):
address Pretoria PRM info, and the PRM there is the
abbreviation for the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration,
So at the very least we know the State Department
set up an email address.
Speaker 6 (48:52):
For this.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
And a few days after that page went up, the
New York Times reported that they had obtained documents outlining
a plan that the administration was calling Mission South Africa,
and phase one of the plan was already under way.
The State Department had dispatched teams to convert vacant office
space in Pretoria for use by US officials who are
(49:16):
going to go over there and review the over eight
thousand applications that had already been received. And in last week,
on April twenty fourth, Reuters reported that US refugee officers
had in fact flown to Pretoria to begin interviewing the
applicants whose applications were successfully reviewed, and they report that
(49:37):
at least thirty Afrikaners who had applied for refugee resettlement
have had their applications approved.
Speaker 1 (49:45):
The sources are.
Speaker 2 (49:46):
All unnamed, and the White House and the Embassy declined
to comment. Anonymous Department of Homeland Security employees told Reuters
that applicants who claimed to have been persecuted by black
South Africans had gained preliminary approval. Another employee told the outlet,
I imagine some will be denied, as we do in
(50:06):
all cases, but I think there is administrative.
Speaker 1 (50:10):
Pressure to approve these.
Speaker 2 (50:15):
The article is careful to note that they attempted to
and were unable to verify the stories of persecution that
were shared with them by several of the applicants, and
the article ends with a quote from the only person
who gave their name a woman named Katya Biden. Biden
(50:35):
works with a very newly formed organization called Americaners. According
to their website, their mission is to assist South Africans
in navigating this process and successfully move to the United
States as refugees. The homepage has a very helpful set
of FAQs. You're basics like do I need a visa?
(50:56):
Do I need a lawyer? And they say no on
both of those, you don't need that. It's going to
be easy. They assure the reader that, of course you
can take your pets with you. The job market is
great there, and you don't need any vaccinations. My favorite question, though,
is will I have to prove persecution? And the answer
(51:20):
is no, you don't have to prove it. Quote no,
you don't. This requirement only occurs when an individual slash
group initiates the refugee status request where the circumstances in
the problem country are unknown. In the South Africa case,
the US is not only aware of the racial prejudice
towards minorities, but President Trump himself has laid out the
(51:43):
case to that effect. So there you have it. This
is the most obvious and clear cut case of persecution
that has ever existed in human history. People who are
fleeing active genocides, active war zones have to do that, yes,
but if you're a white person in South Africa, it's
(52:03):
very obvious that you are suffering, so don't even bother.
And the site assures prospective refugees that this program isn't
just for farmers, even though Trump seems to have been
motivated by the twin boogeymen of farm murders and farm seizures,
issues that even if they were real, would only affect farmers,
(52:28):
but the site assures the reader that all Africaners are eligible.
Guidance from the administration has been muddled and rare and contradictory.
In several of his comments, Trump is definitely using the
word farmers, but in the executive Order he does use
the word africaners. A statement from a State Department official
(52:52):
used the language descendants of settlers being abused by the government,
and a State Department document just as disfavored minorities. And
it sounds like everyone is just trying to avoid saying
white people. And I guess that's good news for Katya Biden,
(53:13):
that woman who works for the Americaners website. She was
wearing a make America Great Again hat when she showed
up at the embassy for her interview, But she isn't
a farmer. According to her personal website, she is a
self love coach. For just two hundred dollars an hour,
you can call Katya on Zoom for a one on
(53:35):
one faith based trauma recovery session to heal from your
toxic relationships. It's audio only, though, she is not going
to turn on the camera, not even if you buy
the twenty dollars twelve week Self Love Journey mentoring package.
Aside from Biden, everyone Reuter spoke to declined to be
(53:57):
named in the article, so it's hard to s out
how many people went in for interviews, what their stories
are if they're all sincere. But I did find one
woman on Facebook who has been posting in multiple groups
for Africaners interested in moving to the United States, and
she actually started posting about this a few days before
(54:18):
The New York Times broke the story that US officials
had begun conducting the interviews in Pretoria. So I'm inclined
to believe she is talking about a real thing that
happened because she couldn't have pulled this from the news.
So a few days before that story broke, a woman
named Anna Lee posted, Hi, everybody, my husband and I
(54:38):
just finished our preliminary interview with the US Embassy in Pretoria.
From what I understand, the interviewers were delegates SLASH, representatives
of the Bureau of Population Refugees in Migration US Department
of State just sent to South Africa for this week's interviews.
Traveling back to the US tonight, she stated in our
invitational email, but this interview was to collect information on
individual's experience, not for a f application. She was very polite,
(55:03):
asked us a few basic questions, then spent most of
the ninety plus minutes asking, listening, and typing our life
experiences and instances where SLASH when we were affected, deprived, persecuted,
or wronged due to our race. A lot of detail
was asked. Most of the focus was on these specific experiences,
(55:25):
and she goes on to say that she doesn't have
much more information, but she was told that she'll hear
from Homeland Security in the coming weeks and that officers
from the US Refugee Admissions Program will be arriving in
South Africa sometime soon. Unnily and her husband do not
appear to be farmers. Her husband is a real estate agent.
(55:46):
They have several adult children, and they appear to be
financially secure enough to enjoy the occasional international vacation. But
I think it's really interesting that she noted how fixated
that State Department employee was on collecting anecdotes about white persecution.
They spent most of that hour and a half long
(56:08):
interview trying to get them to talk about times where
they'd experienced anti white racism. And then just last week,
on April twenty fifth, Katyabeden, that employee of the Americaners Network,
tweeted that the first South African families approved for resettlement
in the United States will arrive here quote next week, which,
(56:32):
if she's telling the truth, would mean that they could
already be here as you're listening to this. The administration
has still not offered any clear explanation of how the
process works or if it's already underway. So it's possible
she's making that up to keep people hopeful, to keep
them going to her website. But it's equally possible that
(56:54):
the Trump administration plucked a couple of the most racist
families in South Africa and just put them on a
plane to Georgia or something. We don't know. Will Trump
follow through on any part of this hard to say
there is so much more to say about this story,
(57:17):
especially because turns out it isn't over. But I know
this story has been going on for too long because
I'm starting to recognize the words when I open a
web page that's in Afrikaans. I had imagined a much
tidier ending to this story, one that I poured two
months and more than fifty thousand words into. But to
(57:40):
be quite honest with you, I watched way too much
Trucker Carlson this week, and I'm trying to have a
wedding in a couple of days. I won't be back
with brand new, full length episodes for the next two weeks,
but I am going to try to get something together
so that there's something for you on your feed while
I'm gone, so you won't.
Speaker 1 (57:59):
Miss me too much.
Speaker 2 (58:01):
So be good to each other, and please don't do
anything that's going to make you one of my weird
Little guys. Weird Little Guys is a production of The
Poolzone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by
(58:23):
me Mollie Conger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and
Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented
Rory Gigan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at Weird Little Guys Podcast at
gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I
probably won't answer it. It's something personal.
All zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
In February of twenty twenty five, the President of the
United States announced, first by social media and then by
executive order that a white nationalist conspiracy theory is now
official foreign policy. No longer relegated to racist message boards
and poorly attended rallies, the idea that white South Africans
(00:29):
are being violently persecuted is now center stage. In the
months since the administration has doubled down on this stance,
foreign aid to South Africa has been suspended, their ambassador
has been expelled, and now State Department officials have begun
interviewing white South Africans who have applied for refugee resettlement
(00:51):
in the United States. Apartheid ended in South Africa thirty
one years ago. It turns out some of the same
people who fought tooth and nail to keep it back
then are still around and they haven't stopped fighting. I'm
(01:13):
Molly Conger, and this is weird.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Little guys.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
You know, I don't like current events. I really prefer
to root around the past and piece together the odds
and ends of the life and crimes of someone who's
done hurting other people. I had a great time writing
five episodes about Dennis Mahon, a man whose career as
a white supremacist activist span decades. But when it came
(01:57):
time to write a follow up episode, I hate it
to have to tell you that, even though Dennis will
almost certainly die before he finish his prison sentence, the
one he got for sending a bomb to the diversity
office in Scottsdale, Arizona, the current political climate finished what
he started. Republican politicians did what he couldn't do with
(02:20):
that bomb, and they closed that office. And we find
ourselves in something of a similar position now. These last
few episodes have been a wild, sprawling narrative about white
supremacist terrorism in South Africa in the final years of apartheid,
and I've learned a lot of history that I'd never
been exposed to before, and I've really enjoyed digging my
(02:43):
way out of some of these unexpected rabbit holes. But
it would be irresponsible of me to tell you such
a long story and then leave you thinking that it
was over, that it ended in nineteen ninety four, that
when apartheid ended, the international networks of right wing extremists
who'd done unspeakable things in its defense just faded away
(03:07):
because they didn't, and they don't always need guns and
bombs to get what they want. So we'll end this
mini series where we started it the White House back
in February. When I started down this path, I had
just read the executive Order, the one titled addressing the
(03:29):
Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa. In the
week that order was signed, Trump had offered some insight
into what was going on in his head in this
post on truth social.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
South Africa is confiscating land and treating certain classes of
people very badly. It's a bad situation that the radical
left media doesn't want so much as mention. A massive
human rights violation at a minimum is happening for all
to see. The United States won't stand for it. We
(04:02):
will act also. I will be cutting off all future
funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this
situation has been completed.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
And that episode back in February goes into more detail
about what he's getting at here. South African President Cyril
Ramaposa had recently signed the Expropriation Act into law. There's
a lot of misinformation and fear mongering built around a
very tiny kernel of truth. In there as a quick refresher,
(04:39):
The Expropriation Act does allow the Government of South Africa
to expropriate land. That part's true, but only under certain
specific conditions. And it is fundamentally not really that different
from what we call eminent domain here in the United States,
(04:59):
and that's a power that was given to our government
by the Fifth Amendment. There's no racial component to it.
Nobody's terrorizing white farmers. There's no language at all in
the Expropriation Act about race. I spent probably too long
trying to look for clues that would help me guess
(05:19):
why he made that post on truth Social on February second.
Sometimes you can see a really clear direct line which
means something the president says or it does or posts online.
And the Fox News segment that he had just been
watching and that episode from back in February makes what
(05:41):
I think is a pretty good case for how Trump's
ideas about what's going on in South Africa were formed
back when he posted about it for the first time
in twenty eighteen, and back in twenty eighteen, he tweeted
about South African land reform for the first time about
forty five minutes after he heard of it on an
episode of Tucker Carlson. But on February second, twenty twenty five,
(06:07):
he made that truth social post while he was sitting
on Air Force one en route to DC after a
weekend golfing in Florida. His public schedule for that day
doesn't give us much, but he did post several times
that evening about Fox News host Mark Levin, and he
posted an old clip from Levin's show, and he reposted
(06:27):
one of Mark's old posts, and he posted in all caps.
Watched Mark Levin tonight on Fox News eight pm Eastern
Great Show, and Levin's show that evening doesn't seem to
have touched on the issue of South Africa, So honestly,
I couldn't tell you how the idea got into his head.
That night, after a long day on the golf course,
(06:48):
he posted it around six nineteen pm, and then forty
minutes later, as he's sitting on the tarmac after the
plane landed, he reposted it. And as he's leaving for
the White House, a reporter asked him about the post. So,
on Tritoto, you said that you were going to touch
it from South Africa. Will you plan to cut eight
(07:10):
across other African nations, in white South and only South Africa.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
Terrible things are happening in South Africa.
Speaker 4 (07:17):
The leadership is.
Speaker 5 (07:20):
Doing some terrible things, horrible things.
Speaker 6 (07:23):
So if that's under investigation right now, we'll make a determination.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
And until such time as we find out what South
Africa is doing.
Speaker 5 (07:32):
They're taking away land.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
They're confiscating land, and actually.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
They're doing things that are perhaps far worse than that.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
The far worse than that at the end of his
remarks is almost certainly a reference to his belief in
the white genocide conspiracy theory, that false narrative that white
farmers in South Africa are being murdered in enormous numbers.
And later that same week, in February of twenty twenty five,
Donald Trump signed the executive order cutting off aid to
(08:05):
South Africa, and it also directed DHS and the State
Department to quote promote the resettlement of African er refugees
escaping government sponsored race based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation,
and so, in conjunction with his other executive orders ones
(08:26):
that suspended all other refugee resettlement operations, this now puts
white South Africans in a class all of their own.
They're the only people on earth who are so persecuted,
who are suffering so terribly that they are deserving of
assistance from the United States. And the executive order ignited
(08:49):
a flurry of activity on the right, both in the
United States and in South Africa. Far right talking heads
rushed to book South African guests, and one man in
particular was very happy to oblige. In the last two months,
Ernst Rootz has made the rounds. He's been interviewed by
(09:10):
Ben Shapiro, Matt Gates, Tucker Carlson, Jack Bestobic, and Jordan Peterson.
He's been on YouTube lives and shows that only exist
on Twitter. Somehow, he made an appearance on a show
hosted by Rinaldo Grause, a South African YouTuber whose political
career was stopped dead in its tracks last summer. Just
(09:30):
days after he was elected to parliament, his own parties
stripped him of membership after video service to him calling
for the murder of all black people, and he used
both the American racial slur that you're probably familiar with
and a South African equivalent. And roots also gave an
(09:52):
interminably long interview to a benign sounding website called the
White Papers Policy Institute, But as it turns out, the
woman interviewing him has a long history of affiliation with
neo Nazi groups, and Ernst Roots may sound familiar to you.
(10:12):
In twenty eighteen, he visited the United States in his
capacity as the deputy CEO of the Africaner nationalist group Afroforum.
He met with federal government officials and right wing think tanks. Notably,
he spent a day at the Heritage Foundation. He took
meetings with staffers for Ted Cruz, and during that visit,
(10:34):
he appeared on an episode of The Talker Carlson Show
back when it was actually on TV, back when it
was appointment television for the president. And you might think
that Ernst Roots would have nothing but praise for Trump's
executive order. Right, He's finally getting this message out, someone
(10:55):
in power is finally talking about this epidemic of white
farm being murdered in South Africa, and he is He's
grateful for that, sure, but he doesn't think Trump's proposed
solution is the right one. Here's what he said when
he sat down with Tucker Carlson at the end of February.
Speaker 7 (11:18):
On one part of it says that they will grant
refugee status to africaners if they want to go to
the US, which I don't think. In all fairness, we're
really grateful for the public stance taken by the US,
and in a certain sense they haven't gone far enough.
But in a certain sense, I don't think the granting
of refugee state is much of a solution. Some people
(11:41):
will take that up. But that's why I told you
the story of the Battle of Blood River and the
vow we are culturally very very attached to South Africa.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
And here he is telling Jordan Peterson the same thing
a few weeks later.
Speaker 7 (12:00):
That's why I'm so grateful that we spoke about the
history part at first is our concern is that if
we just leave the country, our culture dissolves and our
communal identity dissolves and we become Americans or whatever and so.
Speaker 6 (12:15):
Well, plus the entire country descends into lawlessness, chaos and
everyone dies. Yep, right, because if all the white South
African farmers leave, that's one hundred percent what will happen.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Ernst Rutz is a nationalist. He doesn't want to leave
South Africa. He isn't being persecuted for his whiteness. He
just misses the days when white minority rule meant the
persecution of everyone else. And in both those interviews, Ruts
spoke at some length about the importance of the Day
(12:51):
of the Vow, about the covenant between God and the
Africaner granting them that land they can't leave. Men like
Ernst Roots are still standing on the banks of the
Blood River waiting for God to sweep all the Africans
out of their way, and ahead of that whirlwind press Junket.
(13:12):
In February and March, Ernst Ruts actually resigned from his
position as head of the Afrikaner Foundation, and that was
an initiative under the umbrella of the Africanner interest group
the Solidarity Movement, and Ruts says that he hadn't officially
worked for Afroforum since twenty twenty three, but Afroform and
(13:33):
the Africaner Foundation are both just part of the Solidarity movement.
These are just facets of the same organization, and so
now in February of twenty twenty five, he no longer
works for any of these organizations. He no longer works
for Solidarity at all, because it was Roots who got
the organization into some pretty hot water.
Speaker 7 (13:57):
Well, all they're saying that we've the organizations that I
was involved with at the time of committed treason, that
we've been charged for treason.
Speaker 6 (14:04):
Even charged with treason.
Speaker 7 (14:05):
Yeah for what for speaking well, among others, for me
speaking with you about what's happened as treason? Yeah, because
it's bad mouthing your country.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
I mean, we've all made mistakes at work, but I
can't imagine making such a mess of things that somebody
gets charged with treason. And he's watering that down a
little bit.
Speaker 8 (14:29):
Right.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
The accusation isn't just that he's bad mouthing the country.
I'm sure it's legal in South Africa to say negative
things about the nation. But almost immediately after Trump announced
that he was cutting off aid to South Africa, a
lot of South Africans blamed Afro Forum. Members of mkanto
We sizway rallied outside of the police station in Cape
(14:52):
Town and announced that they were filing a criminal complaint
against Affro Forum, accusing them of treason. And just a
quick note for those who aren't up to date on
their South African current events, I wasn't on Kandoce's way
is now its own political party. It does share a
name with the group that functioned as the paramilitary arm
(15:14):
of the African National Congress during the last decades of apartheid,
but as of a few years ago, it is a
political party.
Speaker 5 (15:22):
So just for clarity, the MK Party vehemently condemns the
trees and US actions of Africa Forum, which has deliberately
low it foreign powers to act against the sovereignty and
economic interests of South Africa. Their betrayal is nothing less
(15:42):
than an act of economic sabotage, a direct assault on
our nations independence.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
From many South Africans, it was obvious Trump didn't come
up with this idea on his own. There is a
straight line between afrofums trips to the United States, their
appearances in American right wing media, their collaboration with American
think tanks, their English language propaganda videos targeting American audiences
(16:15):
on American platforms, and the end result, which was this
shift in US foreign policy. Even President Ramaposa has gone
on record blaming Afroform and Solidarity for spreading the lies
about South Africa that led to Trump's executive order. He
called the group unpatriotic in remarks before the National Assembly
(16:38):
in March.
Speaker 8 (16:41):
Fact, whether that is treason US or not is a
meta that obviously our law enforcement agencies needs to look at.
The National Prosecuting Agency needs to look at that. But
I take a dim view, in fact, a very negative
view off what has ensued as they run around the
(17:03):
world bed mouthing their own country and putting their country
into distribute, not by things that are happening, but by misinformation.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
The matter has been confirmed to be under investigation, but
there has been no decision announced by the National Prosecuting
Authority as to whether the case will proceed. When Ramaposa
gave those remarks on March eleventh, twenty twenty five, he
wasn't just talking about Ernst Roots going on.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Tucker Carlson.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Roots had in fact already resigned from Solidarity by the
time he returned to the US this year. But in
late February, a delegation from Solidarity paid a visit to
the United States. They posted quite a few videos of
themselves outside various government buildings in Washington, d C. They
posted some videos of them standing in lobbies of government
(17:59):
buildings and one photo that appears to show the delegation
touring the White House with visible visitors badges. There are
no photos of any members of the delegation that I
could find that show them with any actual US policymakers,
but they did take a couple of selfies in front
of a sign that says Committee on Foreign Affairs. One
(18:22):
photo was taken outside the office of Senator Christopher Coons,
a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and
its Africa and Global Health Policy subcommittee. Their press releases
about this visit don't name names, but they claim to
have met with senior officials within the Trump administration during
their visit.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
There's no direct.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Claim made that they met with the President himself, although
one of them did post a cartoon style drawing of
the group that features a cartoon Trump standing with them
in front of the White House, and that is perhaps
meant to insinuate that they were a to secure an
audience with the President. But one member of the delegation
(19:04):
posted something that is more interesting to me than a
selfie at the Capitol Building. On February twenty seventh, Jako
Kleinhans wrote Day three in Washington, d c. Who influences
US government policy a complex network of individuals, organizations, and
governmental and non governmental structures worked daily to develop US
(19:27):
government policy. Recent policy decisions on the relationship with South
Africa have been developed by a few key players at
influential organizations, together with policy specialist in the White House
and Congress. The Solidarity Movement delegation currently visiting the USA
met on day three with several of these influential people
with whom we have forged good relationships over the past
(19:48):
few years, to discuss a way forward. And underneath this
wall of text posted in Afrikaans is a selfie. Visible
in the photo behind Jacko is the entrance to the
offices of the Heritage Foundation. That conservative think tank is not,
as far as I can tell, publicly commented on the
(20:11):
recently serviced allegations that they worked closely with South African
military intelligence to craft propaganda campaigns during the latter years
of apartheid. South African news outlet The Daily Maverick did
take extra care to note in their article that the
Heritage Foundation has made no legal challenge to the twenty
(20:31):
twenty one book by a former South African policeman who
claims that former Heritage Foundation president Edwin Fulner was often
consulted for advice by South African intelligence operatives who ran
the government's apartheid disinformation campaigns. And if you can remember
all the way back to the first episode in this series,
(20:54):
the first time Trump tweeted about South Africa, he was
watching Tucker Carlson interview a policy analyst from the Heritage Foundation.
Just something to mull over, I guess and whoever it
(21:21):
was that the delegation was able to meet with at
the White House, that person received an official memorandum from Solidarity,
and they also posted that document to their website. Much
like Ernst Rutz, they're grateful to the Trump administration for
raising awareness about the plight of the white South African
but they too want the United States to use its
(21:44):
power to pressure South Africa to bend to the will
of whites, rather than simply offering those aggrieved white South
Africans the opportunity to settle in the United States. Much
of the text of this memorandum reads pretty transparently as
an attempt to smooth over the whole treason situation. They
(22:05):
emphasize repeatedly that they do not support Trump's decision to
cut off humanitarian aid, and they urge Washington not to
suspend the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a US law
that allows some African nations, including South Africa, tariff free
access to US markets. And as much as they appreciate
(22:28):
Trumps offer to take Africaners as refugees, they want to stay.
One section of the memo reads, although individuals may qualify
for a resettlement program, the majority of Africaners will still
remain in South Africa. During the past thirty years, Africaners
have begun to establish cultural infrastructure in South Africa so
(22:50):
that we can still live here freely and safely in
order for us to make a sustainable contribution toward the
country and all its people. This is being done under
the banner of the Solidarity movement, with Solidarity and AFROFUM
being the largest organizations. Security structures, social structures, job structures,
training structures, and cultural structures have been established. All of
(23:12):
this is being done without state support, and at the
bottom of that section they make several recommendations. They recommend
the United States should, instead of offering refugee resettlement, offer
direct aid to these Africaner communities quote to assist with
community infrastructure protecting Africaners. This includes security structures, social structures,
(23:37):
job structure, training structures, and infrastructure to settle africaners in
vulnerable places in a concentrated manner. So they're saying they
want help moving all of the white people to a
place in South Africa. Still they don't want to leave
South Africa, but they need help moving all of the
(23:58):
white people into a concentrated place. So a place that's
all white, and that sounds kind of like a mini
ethno state, a folkstot, if you will, an island of
apartheid and a sea of integration, and that does in
fact already exist. And here's where I have to confess
(24:24):
something to you. I overlooked something in retrospect pretty obvious.
Remember I said a few minutes ago that Ernst Rutz
had resigned from his position with Solidarity and his trip
to the United States in March of twenty twenty five
was totally separate from this delegation. Well it might not
(24:45):
have actually been that separate. I mean they flew here separately,
They were here during different weeks, and they claimed to
be from separate organizations. Roots was here in the United
States with used Stridum, the current sy of Urania, a
white separatist community in South Africa's Northern Cape province. Yako Kleinhans,
(25:08):
the International liaison for Solidarity, who was here with that
other delegation. He used to be the CEO of Irania.
He and his family live there. His wife, Magdalen, was
featured in a Guardian article about the community in twenty nineteen.
She runs the call center in Irania that recruits members
(25:28):
and solicits donations. So they're the same people. The Venn
diagram is a circle. They present slightly different public faces.
I mean, Solidarity was allowed into the White House while
the delegation officially from Irania was stuck doing events like
Wine Wednesday at the New York Young Republicans Club.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
But it's sort of like.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
How sometimes the name brand ketchup and the store brand
ketchup are made at the same factory and they just
package them in different bottles. The two groups traveled the
United States separately a few weeks apart. They met with
slightly different crowds and marketed the message ever so slightly differently.
But ultimately what they want is for the United States
(26:13):
to officially recognize their three point five square mile whites
only town of three thousand people as an autonomous state.
And in February, while that first delegation, the one from
Solidarity was in Washington, d C. An American neo Nazi
group posted photos of their trip to South Africa. A
(26:37):
regional chapter within the Active Club Network visited Urania quote
to gain a deeper understanding of how whites can form
intentional communities. During the first week of March, the delegation
from Solidarity finished out their trip in the United States
with a visit to California. Specifically, they went to Los Angeles.
(26:57):
More specifically, they had lunch with Joel Poum, the editor
at large of the far right rag Breitbart. After lunch,
Pollock tweeted a photo captioned just had lunch at a
kosher restaurant owned by Steven Spielberg's mom with four gentlemen
from afroform Slash Solidarity. The South African government is investigating
(27:17):
them for treason for the crime of sharing their views
of Americans. The treason was delicious, okay, Joel, not to
nitpick and first of all, super cringe, but Steven Spielberg's
mom is dead. Lea Adler, Spielberg's mother did open the
(27:37):
restaurant The Milky Way in Los Angeles, in nineteen seventy seven,
but the restaurant closed after her death in twenty seventeen.
Her children reopened the restaurant in twenty nineteen. So it
is still the same restaurant in the same place, but
it isn't owned by a woman who's been dead for
eight years. But it's probably much more important that you
(27:59):
know one other fact about this lunch. At the time,
in the first week of March of twenty twenty five,
Joel Pollock was widely believed to be Trump's pick for
ambassador to South Africa. There'd been no official public nomination,
but Pollock was out there telling people that and going
on the news in South Africa to that effect. And
(28:22):
after lunch, Yacho Kline Hunts from Solidarity reposted that picture
and offered his full throated endorsement of Pollock's appointment as ambassador.
But barely two weeks after that lunch, Joel Pollock's chances
of getting that job dropped to mere zero. Things were
already a little dicey for him, considering he'd been publicly
(28:45):
calling for sanctions against President Cyril Ramaposa personally, specifically because
of South Africa's continued opposition to the genocide and Gaza.
But the nail in the coffin really seems to have
been his direct, per personal involvement in the expulsion of
South Africa's ambassador to the United States. On March fourteenth,
(29:09):
twenty twenty five, the United States of America expelled the
foreign diplomat. This sort of thing happens from time to time.
Article nine of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations establishes
a pretty broad authority for this quote. The receiving state may,
at any time, and without having to explain its decision,
(29:30):
notify the sending state that the head of the mission
or any member of the diplomatic staff of the mission
is persona non grata. It wasn't uncommon during the Cold War,
usually after allegations of espionage, whether real or imagined, and
it can be a way for a country to send
a political message, to say to a country, we're kind
(29:52):
of upset with you right now, even if the diplomatic
staff themselves haven't done anything wrong. Several countries expelled Syrian
diplomats in twenty twelve in response to the murder of
civilians in Hala. In twenty twenty one, President Aragon declared
diplomats from ten countries persona non grata and Turkey after
(30:12):
those countries governments had called for the release of an
imprisoned Turkish activist. Several Israeli diplomats were expelled from Britain
and Australia in twenty ten after both countries discovered that
Israel had used forged British and Australian passports to carry
out assassinations in Dubai. In twenty eleven, the US ambassador
(30:33):
to Ecuador was expelled after Wikilik's revealed that she believed
President Korea had been aware of corruption within his police force,
and the United States responded by expelling Ecuador's ambassador in return.
And sometimes it's not even political. The decision may be
the result of personal misconduct by a member of the
(30:55):
diplomatic staff. With some rather specific exceptions, ambassadors and their
staff have diplomatic immunity. They can't be prosecuted, but they
can be expelled. So for example, in twenty seventeen, New
Zealand had to expel an American diplomat after the man
got into some kind of violent physical altercation and the
(31:15):
American government refused to waive his diplomatic community so that
it could be prosecuted. In twenty twelve, the Philippines expelled
the Panamanian diplomat accused of rape. Honestly, a lot of
the examples of this that I found were related to
lower level embassy staff who got drunk, got a dui,
(31:36):
got into fights, or committed some kind of sex crime.
There have also been more than a few cases of
diplomats accused of using their position to facilitate drug trafficking.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
So it does happen.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
It doesn't even seem particularly rare, especially if you're including
these examples of lower level embassy staff who maybe got
in a bar fight, but it doesn't usually happen. By tweet,
let's work backwards. At four forty two pm Eastern Time,
(32:12):
on March fourteenth, twenty twenty five, Secretary of State Marco
Rubio tweeted South Africa's ambassador to the United States is
no longer welcome in our great country. Ibrahim Rusoul is
a race baiting politician who hates America and hates Potus.
We have nothing to discuss with him, and so he
(32:32):
is considered persona non grad up. That last bit is
in all caps, which is why I had to yell it,
and for the record, on that read, I did pronounce
Ibrahim Russul's name Ibrahim Razul, which is his name. But
in this I guess official State Department tweet, Marco Rubio
(32:56):
did misspell his name as Emra him Ressool, So take
that as you will. But Rubio's tweet included a link
to a Breitbart article, the headline of which is South
African Ambassador Ibrahim Razul Colan Trump is leading global white
supremacist movement. The article, written by Joel Pollock, had gone
(33:22):
up earlier that same day. Article might not be the
right word for it. I don't know what you call
what appears on Breitbart's website, but Pollock only actually wrote
six sentences in the original piece, but those sentences frame
the actual content. It's a video clip accompanied by a
(33:44):
transcript of the video of statements made by South African
Ambassador Ibrahim Rasul during a webinar hosted by the Mapungubwe
Institute for Strategic Reflection, a South African think tank just
called MISTRA for short.
Speaker 9 (34:01):
What Donald Trump is launching is an assault on incumbency
those who are in power by mobilizing a supremacism against
the incumbency at home, and I think I've illustrated abroad
(34:21):
as well.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
He was speaking to a small group of academics and
rasseul is talking about the ways in which American politics
have changed. He later explained to a reporter, my remarks
were speaking to South African intelligentsia, intellectuals, political leaders, and
others to alert them to a changed tradition in the
United States that the old way of doing business with
(34:47):
the US was not going to work.
Speaker 4 (34:50):
Now.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
I watched most of that webinar. I'm not gonna lie in.
It's two hours long. I didn't watch all of it.
I watched most of that webinar, but I watched all
of the parts where Ibrahim Razu speaking, and nothing he
said felt shocking to me. He wasn't being hysterical or hyperbolic.
He's not tearing his hair and gnashing his teeth. He
(35:13):
had some interesting observations about the way the white South
African functions as a rhetorical dog whistle for white victimhood
within Trump's narrative, But he didn't say anything wild. He's
not calling for violence or talking about radical shifts in policy.
He's a diplomat, right. He was just making correct observations
(35:36):
about the political climate that it is his job to navigate.
But those remarks, with Joel Pollock's six sentences of commentary,
made their way to Marco Rubio within hours, and by
that afternoon, Rubio had declared Rasoul persona nograda and ordered
him to leave the United States. When Rozoul arrived home
(36:01):
in South Africa on March twenty third, he issued a
statement He's standing by what he said about the Trump administration,
and his four page statement has some real bangers. It
goes pretty hard as far as diplomatic statements go. Quote,
when we have been the victims of apartheid and saw
(36:21):
how it cannot tolerate free speech and independent judiciary or
even peaceful dissent, then we can smell the birth of
chauvinism globally since the fear it engenders. Hear its words
and see its signs. And Razul says that quote. In
meetings with Senators and Congress members, and in the weekly
(36:42):
forums we addressed of think tanks and business associations, and
in the few meetings with the administration, we were forced
to discuss seriously how Africaners could be refugees in the USA,
while A and C leaders are threatened with personal sanctions,
we had to have void arguing how there was a
genocide in Israel. But diplomacy is not the art of lying.
(37:07):
It is the art of telling the truth gently and constructively.
Pollack sees on one line of that statement, in particular,
a parenthetical mention of an anonymous participant in the webinar,
who Rasoul calls one ex South African anti intellectual hatchetman
hiding under a pseudonym, and that's obviously a reference to
(37:29):
Joel Pollock. Rasoul is implying that Pollock himself not only
joined that webinar live, but participated in it without disclosing
his name or affiliation, and in this case his affiliation
would be editor of American conservative website Breitbart dot com
(37:51):
and also current contender for American Ambassador to South Africa.
Because during the Q and A portion, the moderator read
submitted questions out loud, and when he did so, he
read the question asker's name, and when the question was
from a reporter, the name of the outlet. The very
(38:12):
first question though, was from anonymous.
Speaker 4 (38:19):
First, because I like to start with something funny, an
anonymous comment for Ambassador Usoul Ambassador to Ssool's analysis of
the US may be correct. However, he's doing South Africa
no service by speaking this way. His job is to
represent South African interests in Washington, not to be a
left doing militant Ambassador Zoul.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Now, can I tell you for sure that that question
was submitted by Joel Pollock? Of course not, but that
appears to be what Ibraham Razool is implying in his
statement that he believes that Pollock tweeted a screenshot of
that portion of the statement and said ex Ambassador Ibrahim
Rescuol believes he was done in by a spy. Good
(39:04):
luck hunting. I watched his remarks on YouTube after they
had been publicly available at Miestra's channel for hours. Is
incompetence a defense to defamation in South African law? So
Pollack is in this tweet insinuating that he could sue
Ibrahim Rescoul for defamation for implying that Pollock was in
(39:28):
the webinar. I don't know anything about South African law,
but I don't think in an American court a claim
of defamation would hold up because he didn't actually say
Joel Pollock's name. I guess if Joel Pollock identifies publicly
as an anti intellectual hatchet man, he's welcome to make
that argument in court. But I digress, because back to
(39:52):
his actual acclaim, he's saying he wasn't in the webinar live.
He watched the replay on YouTube hours after the ended.
And the problem with that is that it isn't true.
The webinar was live. You could pre register and participate
in the Zoom meeting, or you could just watch it
(40:13):
live on YouTube. And the event was from ten am
to noon Johannesburg time, and that means that it started
at four am here on the East Coast and one
am in California, which is where Joel Pollack lives. And
I'm reasonably certain he was indeed in California that day
(40:36):
because the night before he posted a photo of the sunset,
and that morning he posted a photo of the sun rise,
and both photos were posted at the time that the
sun rose and set in the part of California where
he lives, and there are visible palm trees. So when
Joel Pollock tweeted the link to his article at eight
(40:57):
forty five am Eastern time, that's five forty five am,
where he lives, and the source code for the web
page shows that the article went live at eight thirty
five am Eastern. Again, that's five thirty five am Pacific,
and that's two and a half hours after the event ended.
(41:18):
Those six sentences didn't take two hours to write, but
he would have had to download the entire video, cut
the sections he wanted to post, transcribe those sections, and
get everything onto the website. The other problem, though, is
not how long it would have taken to cut the clips.
It's that he could not have watched a two hour
(41:41):
video and then written the article if he didn't start
watching the video until quote hours after the event ended
and the final video was available for playback online. An
op ed written by the director of the think tank
that hosted the event takes aim at Pollack, arguing that
(42:02):
it was no accident that his article made its way
to the White House so quickly. Quote Russeul has been
articulating these views and other interactions with US audiences. The
difference in this case is that Joel Pollack at Breitbart
News himself campaigning to be US ambassador in South Africa,
selectively quoted from Russeul's presentation deliberately to incite the US administration.
(42:29):
But Joel Pollock got what he wanted, kind of. He
got Ibrahim Russeul expelled from the United States, got him fired.
Ibrahim Russeul isn't the ambassador to the United States anymore.
It's a bit of a monkey's paw situation for Joel Pollock,
though the whole affair ended up ruining his own ambitions
(42:50):
of becoming an ambassador. Within days of all this going down,
Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighter's party vowed that they would
block Pollock from entering South Africa at all if he
was appointed ambassador, and they said that they could ensure
President Ramaposo wouldn't accept the appointment. A presidential spokesman was
(43:11):
a little more diplomatic about this, but they did go
on the record that the President was concerned about the
possibility of Pollock being appointed ambassador because quote, he is
engaged in a very divisive and very damaging manner towards
South Africa and South Africa related issues. By March twenty six,
(43:32):
just twelve days after Pollock's post cost Ambassador to School
his job, it was clear that he'd cost himself the
ambassador's job to Trump boasted on Truth Social that he
would be nominating Brent Bozell as the United States Ambassador
to South Africa. Brent Mozelle is not a better choice.
(44:08):
There's a lot of history behind that name, especially considering
he shares it with his father, Leo Brent Mozell the Second.
He was William F. Buckley's best friend and Joseph McCarthy's
speech writer. And then there is of course his son,
Leo Brent Bozell the fourth, who was convicted of five
felonies before getting pardoned along with all of the other
(44:29):
January six rioters. And we can't get into all that
not today. The thing you might be interested to know
about Leo Brent Mozell the Third is that he pretty
actively opposed the idea of ending apartheid, and not just
as a casual private opinion. This wasn't an ugly thought
(44:51):
he was having at home by himself.
Speaker 8 (44:53):
No.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
In nineteen eighty seven he was the head of the
National Conservative Political Action Committee, and in that capacity he
signed on as a coalition partner for a group called
the Coalition Against a n C Terrorism, and that year
the group hosted a summit to oppose a meeting between
the U S Secretary of State and Oliver Tambo, who
(45:16):
was at the time the leader of the African National Congress.
And speakers at the summit that they held included policy
analysts from groups like the Heritage Foundation. They also brought
in a South African political activist named John Gogotya. Gogatya
was the founder and leader of a political organization in
(45:38):
South Africa. It was allegedly a group of black moderates
who opposed multi racial democracy. Gogotya actually made several trips
to the United States to lobby against US sanctions on
the apartheid regime. He did turn out to be employed
by South African military intelligence, but you probably already guessed that.
(46:03):
That same year, nineteen eighty seven, Bozell produced a series
of television commercials urging Americans to write to the White
House to express their support for the Nicaraguan contras. Before
the commercials were released, Bozell attended a screening of the
videos with his special guest, Death Squad leader Adolfo Calero.
(46:25):
So there's definitely some baggage there for Bozell. The South
African Party that he was calling terrorists in nineteen eighty seven,
holds the presidency right now. Cyril Ramaposa, the current President
of South Africa, was one of the African National Congress's
negotiators during the talks that ended apartheid. While there was
(46:48):
some public uncertainty as to whether Ramaposa would admit Pollock
as an ambassador, I haven't seen any speculation that the
President would refuse to accept Bozell. But honestly, once Trump
posted that online that he was going to nominate Bozell,
there was not a lot of follow up to that,
so I guess we'll have to wait and see if
(47:08):
he's even confirmed. Because among the countless problems created every
day by the current administration is this lack of follow up.
It seems like every day the President just fires off
some half baked demand that doesn't really have any clear
force of law or plan for implementation, and maybe some
(47:31):
government office is working on implementing the new policy, and
maybe they aren't. It's hard to say that Executive order
back in February called for the Secretary of State and
the Secretary of Homeland Security to prioritize humanitarian relief, including
admission and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions program
(47:52):
for Africanners, and then a month later, on March seventh,
he posted on truth Social any farmer with family from
South Africa seeking to flee that country for reasons of
safety will be invited to the United States of America
with a rapid pathway to citizenship. This process will begin immediately.
(48:13):
A few weeks later, the website for the US Embassy
in South Africa posted a very generic set of FAQs
about the refugee admissions program, but it doesn't have any
information specific to this program or any particular timeline. It
just directs those who are interested in inquiring about the
program to send a message to a State Department email
(48:36):
address Pretoria PRM info, and the PRM there is the
abbreviation for the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration,
So at the very least we know the State Department
set up an email address.
Speaker 6 (48:52):
For this.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
And a few days after that page went up, the
New York Times reported that they had obtained documents outlining
a plan that the administration was calling Mission South Africa,
and phase one of the plan was already under way.
The State Department had dispatched teams to convert vacant office
space in Pretoria for use by US officials who are
(49:16):
going to go over there and review the over eight
thousand applications that had already been received. And in last week,
on April twenty fourth, Reuters reported that US refugee officers
had in fact flown to Pretoria to begin interviewing the
applicants whose applications were successfully reviewed, and they report that
(49:37):
at least thirty Afrikaners who had applied for refugee resettlement
have had their applications approved.
Speaker 1 (49:45):
The sources are.
Speaker 2 (49:46):
All unnamed, and the White House and the Embassy declined
to comment. Anonymous Department of Homeland Security employees told Reuters
that applicants who claimed to have been persecuted by black
South Africans had gained preliminary approval. Another employee told the outlet,
I imagine some will be denied, as we do in
(50:06):
all cases, but I think there is administrative.
Speaker 1 (50:10):
Pressure to approve these.
Speaker 2 (50:15):
The article is careful to note that they attempted to
and were unable to verify the stories of persecution that
were shared with them by several of the applicants, and
the article ends with a quote from the only person
who gave their name a woman named Katya Biden. Biden
(50:35):
works with a very newly formed organization called Americaners. According
to their website, their mission is to assist South Africans
in navigating this process and successfully move to the United
States as refugees. The homepage has a very helpful set
of FAQs. You're basics like do I need a visa?
(50:56):
Do I need a lawyer? And they say no on
both of those, you don't need that. It's going to
be easy. They assure the reader that, of course you
can take your pets with you. The job market is
great there, and you don't need any vaccinations. My favorite question, though,
is will I have to prove persecution? And the answer
(51:20):
is no, you don't have to prove it. Quote no,
you don't. This requirement only occurs when an individual slash
group initiates the refugee status request where the circumstances in
the problem country are unknown. In the South Africa case,
the US is not only aware of the racial prejudice
towards minorities, but President Trump himself has laid out the
(51:43):
case to that effect. So there you have it. This
is the most obvious and clear cut case of persecution
that has ever existed in human history. People who are
fleeing active genocides, active war zones have to do that, yes,
but if you're a white person in South Africa, it's
(52:03):
very obvious that you are suffering, so don't even bother.
And the site assures prospective refugees that this program isn't
just for farmers, even though Trump seems to have been
motivated by the twin boogeymen of farm murders and farm seizures,
issues that even if they were real, would only affect farmers,
(52:28):
but the site assures the reader that all Africaners are eligible.
Guidance from the administration has been muddled and rare and contradictory.
In several of his comments, Trump is definitely using the
word farmers, but in the executive Order he does use
the word africaners. A statement from a State Department official
(52:52):
used the language descendants of settlers being abused by the government,
and a State Department document just as disfavored minorities. And
it sounds like everyone is just trying to avoid saying
white people. And I guess that's good news for Katya Biden,
(53:13):
that woman who works for the Americaners website. She was
wearing a make America Great Again hat when she showed
up at the embassy for her interview, But she isn't
a farmer. According to her personal website, she is a
self love coach. For just two hundred dollars an hour,
you can call Katya on Zoom for a one on
(53:35):
one faith based trauma recovery session to heal from your
toxic relationships. It's audio only, though, she is not going
to turn on the camera, not even if you buy
the twenty dollars twelve week Self Love Journey mentoring package.
Aside from Biden, everyone Reuter spoke to declined to be
(53:57):
named in the article, so it's hard to s out
how many people went in for interviews, what their stories
are if they're all sincere. But I did find one
woman on Facebook who has been posting in multiple groups
for Africaners interested in moving to the United States, and
she actually started posting about this a few days before
(54:18):
The New York Times broke the story that US officials
had begun conducting the interviews in Pretoria. So I'm inclined
to believe she is talking about a real thing that
happened because she couldn't have pulled this from the news.
So a few days before that story broke, a woman
named Anna Lee posted, Hi, everybody, my husband and I
(54:38):
just finished our preliminary interview with the US Embassy in Pretoria.
From what I understand, the interviewers were delegates SLASH, representatives
of the Bureau of Population Refugees in Migration US Department
of State just sent to South Africa for this week's interviews.
Traveling back to the US tonight, she stated in our
invitational email, but this interview was to collect information on
individual's experience, not for a f application. She was very polite,
(55:03):
asked us a few basic questions, then spent most of
the ninety plus minutes asking, listening, and typing our life
experiences and instances where SLASH when we were affected, deprived, persecuted,
or wronged due to our race. A lot of detail
was asked. Most of the focus was on these specific experiences,
(55:25):
and she goes on to say that she doesn't have
much more information, but she was told that she'll hear
from Homeland Security in the coming weeks and that officers
from the US Refugee Admissions Program will be arriving in
South Africa sometime soon. Unnily and her husband do not
appear to be farmers. Her husband is a real estate agent.
(55:46):
They have several adult children, and they appear to be
financially secure enough to enjoy the occasional international vacation. But
I think it's really interesting that she noted how fixated
that State Department employee was on collecting anecdotes about white persecution.
They spent most of that hour and a half long
(56:08):
interview trying to get them to talk about times where
they'd experienced anti white racism. And then just last week,
on April twenty fifth, Katyabeden, that employee of the Americaners Network,
tweeted that the first South African families approved for resettlement
in the United States will arrive here quote next week, which,
(56:32):
if she's telling the truth, would mean that they could
already be here as you're listening to this. The administration
has still not offered any clear explanation of how the
process works or if it's already underway. So it's possible
she's making that up to keep people hopeful, to keep
them going to her website. But it's equally possible that
(56:54):
the Trump administration plucked a couple of the most racist
families in South Africa and just put them on a
plane to Georgia or something. We don't know. Will Trump
follow through on any part of this hard to say
there is so much more to say about this story,
(57:17):
especially because turns out it isn't over. But I know
this story has been going on for too long because
I'm starting to recognize the words when I open a
web page that's in Afrikaans. I had imagined a much
tidier ending to this story, one that I poured two
months and more than fifty thousand words into. But to
(57:40):
be quite honest with you, I watched way too much
Trucker Carlson this week, and I'm trying to have a
wedding in a couple of days. I won't be back
with brand new, full length episodes for the next two weeks,
but I am going to try to get something together
so that there's something for you on your feed while
I'm gone, so you won't.
Speaker 1 (57:59):
Miss me too much.
Speaker 2 (58:01):
So be good to each other, and please don't do
anything that's going to make you one of my weird
Little guys. Weird Little Guys is a production of The
Poolzone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by
(58:23):
me Mollie Conger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and
Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented
Rory Gigan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at Weird Little Guys Podcast at
gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I
probably won't answer it. It's something personal.
Host
Molly Conger
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